Offseason Top Prospects lists

The Ultimate Champion · January 17, 2014

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 16, 2014 -> 08:09 AM)

I for one think that scouting of minor leaguers has swung too far towards physical tools. I think we're missing out on good baseball players in some cases by doing that.

And before anyone launches into the obvious here, I'm aware of how all this works. Stats in the lower levels of the minors, for example, don't mean a lot. And obviously, some of the time at least, success in the minors may be an illusion.

That all said, when you have players who put up big numbers in the upper levels of the minors, I think scouting types are sometimes too quick to write them off based on things like a lack of a single, flashy plus tool, or the fact that a guy is say 24 vs 22/23. Not that those factors aren't relevant, because they very much are - but for some, those perceived tools have been allowed to crowd out performance nearly entirely. My personal view is, that trend will start to reverse itself in the next few years, a bit.

Actually I think the issue (at least with us) is overestimating our ability to encourage and develop mechanical changes in hitters now that I think about it. We can do these things with pitchers, but both at the MiLB & MLB level we can't seem to hold on to and then successfully implement any sort of real changes. Because of this we aren't clearing our margin of error, i.e. we'll say take Player A who needs X amount of work and we think we can pull it off which means the tools advantage that Player A has over Player B will translate into a better MLB player. But we've been too aggressive & have had too little results. We seem to be scaling back on our hitters a bit but still doing so without falling into the range of the offensive version of Broadway/McCulloch territory. At least I hope that's the case because we need ceiling but OTOH developing hitters hasn't exactly been a core competency of the organization.

NorthSideSox72 · January 17, 2014

QUOTE (The Ultimate Champion @ Jan 17, 2014 -> 11:46 AM)

Actually I think the issue (at least with us) is overestimating our ability to encourage and develop mechanical changes in hitters now that I think about it. We can do these things with pitchers, but both at the MiLB & MLB level we can't seem to hold on to and then successfully implement any sort of real changes. Because of this we aren't clearing our margin of error, i.e. we'll say take Player A who needs X amount of work and we think we can pull it off which means the tools advantage that Player A has over Player B will translate into a better MLB player. But we've been too aggressive & have had too little results. We seem to be scaling back on our hitters a bit but still doing so without falling into the range of the offensive version of Broadway/McCulloch territory. At least I hope that's the case because we need ceiling but OTOH developing hitters hasn't exactly been a core competency of the organization.

I agree with you, but I think that is sort of a seperate subject.

I'll also say though, first, the org has a very different set of coaches now than they did a few years ago - so I am not sure you can say this problem with hitters will continue the same way. It might or might now. Also, I don't think you can just give up and say we can't develop them so let's draft pitchers - because you are then closing yourself off to HALF (at least) of what you need to develop to be successful. You have to keep trying, make more changes, and try again until you get it right.

NorthSideSox72 · February 3, 2014